Book Burnings In Nazi Germany

“A word to the unwise. Torch every book. Char every page. Burn every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.” Ellen Hopkins. The government in this society is burning all of the knowledge. The books may be burnt but ideas and your imagination are unretrievable, that can be passed down through generations. The government has the real fear. Censorship is bad and takes away from your imagination and creativity.

The freedom to think is often taken for granted among civilization. What people do not realize is that their freedom of thought can be controlled with enough deceit and manipulation. Sometimes, most people do not even know that the way they think is being controlled. This fact is proven in the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. The book peers into a dystopian society led by a corrupt government. Total mental and political control is what the government wants, while freedom of thought is what they do not want. These goals are achieved through means that are subtle, and obvious: manipulation through social media, through legal restrictions, and through the destruction of books.

The burning of books is limiting free speech by removing a medium to express ideas and opinions. The government’s main vision is that by burning books, people will become happy. This theory is debatable, but it clearly defies the freedom of speech. Censorship of this degree violates free speech by suppressing ideas, as shown when Beatty claims “‘Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it.”(59). By removing books with conflicting ideas like this, the government is systematically destroying the idea of free speech. When people cannot express their ideas freely, free speech is being vehemently defied.Equally consequential is the effect that burning books has on people’s political knowledge. Considering that the government’s goal is to keep people content with their political views, Beatty explains that “‘If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him. . . . give him none.’”(61). The government’s method of censoring political information is burning books, and therefore, free speech is

"If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation." Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1938 (Isaacs 66)

Nearly a century before World War II, German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine wrote, “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people" (“Holocaust History”). These chilling words not only forecasted the events to come, but also went up in flames in Germany during the Nazi book burning. Throughout Germany on May 10, 1933, thousands of people came out to witness these horrid events. These public displays of censorship were monstrous in nature.

Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel, Fahrenheit 451 displays a setting where books are being burned instead of read. The novel initially begins with a detailed description of books being burned, with emphasis placed on describing the book as a "flapping pigeon" that slowly dies on a porch (1). The process of burning books is expanded throughout the novel, in which the government encourages the destruction of books by altering history and restructuring the original purpose of firemen: to put out fires. The process of burning books, does not only include setting paper on fire, instead it speaks of the destruction of each thought that are embedded within the paper of the book. Ray Bradbury wants to point out a much a larger critique that is prevalent

The Jewish poet Heinrich Heine once said, "Where books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too." Did you know that the Chinese government uses “The Great Firewall” of China to monitor and prohibit any dissent against the Chinese government?(Mark Jacob and Stephan Benzkofer) These kind of actions are called acts of censorship and most of them are against the 1st amendment, law prohibiting that Congress can’t pass a law that establishes religion, or restricts the freedom of speech in America . Censorship is when a government or social group regulates the content in movies, books, and other types of media, and prohibits content they consider obscene or inappropriate. Another instance of censorship is when 20,000 books were burned in 1933 by the Germans in the beginning of the Nazi regime(Holocaust Encyclopedia). The grave incidents that happened on May 10, 1933 were a direct result of the German propaganda against anything Jewish and non-socialist.

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury, details a world filled with mindless entertainment and a lack of self-expression. Everyone is not only discouraged to think for themselves, but also fearful of unique thoughts and ideas. A quote from the book that would describe this is, “It was a pleasure to burn…with the brass nozzle in his fists…blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history…While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark and burning.” (1) Books, which would provide information and knowledge, are forbidden and burned. The owner who is caught with them is put in prison. The idea of a society run by one who dictate the rules, take away all freedom. These consequences for disobeying and being an “individual” are strong reasons the

“Heinrich Heine on Burning Books” is a passage written by Austin Cline that speaks about the most infamous deeds Nazi Germany is known for, burning books and burning people.

Our society is all about entertainment and government control. Everyday hours are wasted watching a screen. Every day the government makes more and more request to censor items on Google. In the novel Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury warns future generations not to be trapped by entertainment and the government censorship. Look around; we are no different. This essay will state the similarities and differences between our societies. I believe that if we keep heading in this direction we will turn out to be like the Fahrenheit 451 society.

Censorship is one of the many manifestations used by the Nazi’s throughout the most notorious genocide in history. Censorship is essentially “the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security.” Book Burnings are a method of censorship that the government uses to diminish a group of people’s interpretations, very often in a time of annihilation. Heinrich Heine once said, "Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings." Book Burning, the public act of turning books to ash, ultimately resorts to the act of turning humans to ash. Books represent the rights of freedom of speech and freedom to express your beliefs, and when those rights are taken away, dehumanization is the outcome. The May 10, 1933 Nazi book burning, was the first major act of censorship against the Jews. Symbolically, the extermination of 25,000 books ultimately led to the murder of six million Jews. The act of book burning prohibits the spread of information through literary works, contrary to the ultimate goal of authors and publishers who wish to share their opinions.

Fahrenheit 451 is a novel that has widely used satire of censorship to depict the situation in the real world whereby human beings use censorship to hide whatever they find not pleasant to expose to the masses. Due to the idea of hiding some issues from the masses, much important information and the truth is hidden from the society. This paper will discuss how people use censorship to omit to expose all the information that dissatisfy them. The thesis statement is that, in the novel, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury has highlighted different issues, but the most controversial issue is the oppressing social media about entertainment, technology, minds and culture that uses censorship to leave the citizens into the allegory of the cave.

The Book Thief has helped me overcome fear, as well as teaching me about the holocaust. It showed me how powerful Liesel and her words can go, and teaching me I can overcome anything as long as I persist through the problem. You even put death as the narrator, which shows how horrible this war was, and the amazing story of Liesel.

•The most famous book in the Holocaust was written by a 13 year old girl, and it has been read by 10 million people.

The use of censorship to examine and eliminate elements in media that are found to be unorthodox or radical has been prevalent in society for centuries. Through censorship, ideas found to be objectionable or offensive are repressed. In his prophetic novel, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury denotes the common practice of government censorship of books as a suppressive and marginalizing concept for humans because it strips them of the realities, truths, and meaning behind books and deprives them the freedom to deliberate and act on them. The protagonist, Guy Montag lives in a futuristic, American society and is a ‘firemen’; a group of men that deflect the old conventional purpose of stopping fires, to creating